The
Worlds Of Science Fiction Comics

Science
fiction and comics may not be a marriage made in heaven, but it's obvious
that they were made for each other. As two genres concerned with the imagination
of the fantastic, it's not surprising that they share much in common. Many
of the editors, writers, and artists in comics have also been active as
science fiction professionals. Edmund Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellmen, and
Alfred Bester are some of the s.f. writers who have moonlighted in comics,
while artists like Alex Schomberg, Frank Frazetta, and Wallace
Wood have worked in both fields.

Comics editors Julius Schwartz and Mort
Weisinger published an early science fiction fan magazine (or "fanzine")
called the Time Traveler.Superman himself
first appeared in a fanzine edited by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1933.
And then there's the subject matter: rockets, robots, aliens, time travel,
all colorful images of worlds beyond our own and rich visual material for
writers and artists to explore.

Science fiction as panel art first appeared
in the newspapers as Buck Rogers in the Year 2429
A.D,a strip created by Philip Nowlan and Dick Calkins. It had originally
been published in Hugo Gernsbach's Amazing Stories in 1928 as a
story, debuting as a strip a year later (providing some people with a negative
description of science fiction, "that crazy Buck Rogers stuff").

Other s.f. newspaper strips soon followed,
notably Alex Raymond's Flash
Gordon on the Planet Mongo. in 1934 A year after Flash's
debut, the first science fiction feature in a comic appeared as an obvious
rip-off: Don Drake on the Planet Saro was produced by Clemens Gretter
and Kenneth Fitch, who teamed up that same year for perhaps a more original
series, Super Police 2023. In 1937 the two produced another s.f.
series about a super scientist, Don Hastings, which first appeared
in Harry "A" Chesler's Star Comics. The series would continue for
almost a decade, at times written by s.f. writer Otto ( Adam
Link) Binder.

Buck Rogers hadn't been neglected by the
sincerest form of flattery: Star Comics also came out with Dash
of the 100th Century, and Sub-Mariner artist
Bill
Everett came up with Skyrocket Steele in the Year X. More Rogers/Gordon
clones followed ( Rocket Riley, Prince of the Planets, Streak Chandler
on
Mars), named after every planet in the solar system and from various
centuries extending right up to A.D. 1,000,000!

Outside of the Buck Rogers and Flash
Gordon reprints, the main comics title in the 1940s to publish continuous
science fiction was Fiction House's Planet Comics, a spin-off of
the company's Planet Science Fiction pulp magazine. Pulps were hardly
known for sophistication and Planet Comics followed that tradition
by relying on lurid covers and stories that followed the "guy, gal, and
monster" formula. Pin-up style women were menaced by grotesque aliens in
almost every issue. Two of Planet's writers were women, Lilly Renee
and Frances Hooper, a rarity for those times. Strangely enough, judging
from the comic's letter page, Planet Comics also attracted an enthusiastic
female readership.

With the detonation of the atomic bomb
and the increasing sophistication of science fiction itself, the 1950s
saw a corresponding growth of maturity of comic book science fiction. E.C.
Comics' Weird Science and Weird Fantasy were proof of that,
inarguably the best the best s.f. comics of all time.

As editor Al Feldstein
put it in one interview, "We never underestimated our audience… We were
writing for ourselves at our age level, and I think perhaps that was responsible
for the level we reached." Stories for the two titles were co-plotted
by Feldstein and publisher
Bill
Gaines. The two went beyond the usual cowboys and Indians in outer
space treatment, concentrating on tightly written short stories, four to
a book, that were designed to deliver a surprise ending.The stories dealt with themes about dystopias,
nuclear holocausts, bigotry, time travel paradoxes, and sexual betrayal.

Gaines
and Feldstein were both science fiction readers and, with the stress of
having to turn out about 28 stories a month for seven titles, were not
above lifting plots from their favorite authors. One such swipe was Home
To
Stay, cobbled together from two Ray
Bradbury stories in The Illustrated Man.

Bradbury, a cartooning fan, noticed the
swipe and sent Gaines a gently chiding letter. This resulted in authorized
Bradbury adaptations in all the E.C. titles (except the war books and Mad).
Bradbury was pleased with the results. Weird Science and Weird
Fantasy were some of the best-illustrated comics ever produced. Wally
Wood did an impressive job on There Will Come Soft Rains, and Bernie
Krigstein turned out one of the best jobs of his career with The
Flying Machine. My own personal favorite Bradbury treatment is Al
Williamson'sA Sound Of Thunder.

Sadly, Weird
Science and Weird
Fantasy were the low sellers of the E.C. line. By 1952 they began
to lose money. By the end of 1953 Gaines combined the two into one title,
Weird
Science Fantasy. Thanks to the Wertham-inspired attacks on horror
comics, he was soon forced to drop "Weird," for fear of offending timid
news dealers, and changed the title to Incredible Science Fiction.
Compared to the early titles stories were watered down in deference to
the newly instituted Comics Code Authority. Sales continued to decline
and, due to a ridiculous tussle with the CCA over an anti-bigotry story,
Gaines quit in disgust, dropping all his books save Mad.

E.C. had inspired other publishers to bring
out their own s.f. titles. Among them were DC Comics' Strange
Adventures (August 1950) and Mystery
In Space (April 1951). Ziff-Davis, publisher of Amazing
Stories magazine, entered the field with Weird Thrillers
(September 1951) and Space Busters (1952). Virtually all the publishers
carried science fiction titles and all them were to suffer a drop in sales
until The Space Race began between Russia and the United States, sparking
the public's interest in the genre. Two other boosts later came from television
and film; Star Trek, the1966 tv series,
and George Lucas' Star Wars movie (1977). Both were adapted in comics
format, with a Star Wars series enjoying a ten-year run. There were
other adaptations of television shows, among them The Twilight Zone,
The Outer Limits, Time Tunnel, and The Invaders.

In more recent times, while it existed
(1986-1995), Kitchen Sink Press published the Harvey and Eisner Award winning
Xenozoic
Tales, a post-cataclysm series written and drawn by Mark
Schultz (I did the back up stories). The comic has been collected in
three anthologies and had a brief run as an animated cartoon, Cadillacs
and Dinosaurs.

Heavy Metal magazine (once edited
by s.f. writer
Ted
White) has run numerous s.f. stories by European and American creators,
and in 1996 DC Comics launched a science fiction line, Helix Comics.
That
line regrettably folded after a relatively short run, but many science
fiction comics are still around to entertain readers today. I suspect that,
as long as in an interest in the future remains part of human nature, it
will continue to do so in the years to come.